Viva Republica is, objectively speaking, the most disruptive fintech startup in South Korea. Since the 2015 launch of its simple peer-to-peer payments app Toss, banks are finally revamping their user experiences and customers have easier access to financial products than ever. South Korea’s mobile payments have more than quadrupled in that time to form a $4.6 billion industry, according to Bank of Korea data.

It’s hard to call it coincidence, and the $76 million funded startup hasn’t stopped there. After a $48 million PayPal-backed investment in March, Toss has grown from a simple money transfer app to a platform of diverse consumer finance services generating $20 million in expected revenue in 2017.

Breaking a billion

After my early-year forecast that Viva Republica would be the most likely startup to break out in 2017, the company today said its flagship app Toss, now the fastest-growing mobile P2P payment service globally, has reached $12 billion transaction volume this year — an average $1 billion a month.

Putting that into context, Venmo, another Paypal-backed startup, took four years to reach the same rate and is currently processing $2.5 billion in monthly transactions, Toss says. But Toss, with 12 million users, was able to reach that benchmark in about half the time and has sights on breaking even in the near future — a global first in the P2P payments space, says founder and CEO Seung-gun Lee.